Who Should Search--Adoptee or birth mother?

Jeanette Winterson

"Do you plan to search for your birth parents" asked my impudent first mother friend at a reading by English writer Jeanette Winterson of her prize-winning 1985 novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.  Winterson brushed the question aside. "If they want to find me, they know where to find me" referring to her fame and her original parents in the UK.  Subsequently, though, Winterson did search and had a good reunion with her first mother, a story she recounts in her 2011 memoir Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal.

Why Be Normal When You Could Be Jeanette Winterson?

Winterson in Warsaw, 2005

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is the title of a scrupulously honest and soul-baring memoir by the acclaimed British writer, Jeanette Winterson, who was adopted not by a loving "forever family" but by a crazed, larger-than-life Pentecostal woman who hated sex, force-fed the Bible on her brilliant, rebellious daughter, and kept a gun in the dresser as she waited for Armageddon.

What about this daughter that seemed to have no earthly (or heavenly) relationship to the woman the world knew as her mum? Well, as her adoptive mother--almost always called the distancing Mrs. Winterson or Mrs. W.,--used to say when Jeanette angered her: "The Devil led us to the wrong crib." That's on the first page. Hold on, you're in for a bumpy ride.